Thomas Hoccleve

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Hoccleve and Chaucer

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SOURCE: Burrow, J. A. “Hoccleve and Chaucer.” In Chaucer Traditions: Studies in Honor of Derek Brewer, 54-61. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

[In the essay that follows, Burrow briefly outlines Hoccleve's debt to Chaucer as well as the ways in which Hoccleve might be appreciated more favorably on his own terms. Although Hoccleve's literary art owes much to his mentor, his best work is in the explicit political themes and autobiographical details that Chaucer himself eschewed.]

Some twelve years after Chaucer's death, Thomas Hoccleve paid tribute to the eloquence, wisdom, and piety of his predecessor in three passages of The Regement of Princes.1 Hoccleve's admiration, he claims, is based upon personal acquaintance; for when, in the Regement prologue, he first reveals his name to the old almsman, the latter's immediate reaction is to identify him as one of those people who knew Chaucer:

‘Hoccleve, some?’ ‘Iwis, fadir, þat same.’
‘Sone, I have herd or this men speke of þe;
Þou were aqueynted with Caucher, pardee—
God have his soule best of any wyght!’

(1865-8)

Later, Hoccleve recalls how Chaucer was accustomed to help him with ‘consail and reed’:

‘Mi dere maistir—God his soule quyte!—
And fadir Chaucer fayn wolde han me taght;
But I was dul, and lerned lite or naght.’

(2077-9)

The apology for dullness is conventional enough; but there are no good reasons to doubt that Hoccleve had, towards the end of the previous century, sat at Chaucer's feet and received from him some kind of instruction in the art of English poetry.2

Given this association, it is not surprising that certain of Hoccleve's own poems should have been attracted into the Chaucerian orbit during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Like Chaucer, Hoccleve ‘wroot ful many a lyne’ in praise of the Virgin Mary (Regement, 4987), and two of his eight Marian poems proved capable of being mistaken for the master's. The Miracle of the Virgin which he wrote in imitation of the Prioress's Tale found a place in one manuscript of the Canterbury Tales, introduced there in a spurious prologue as the Plowman's Tale;3 and one of his Marian lyrics, having been attributed to Chaucer by two Scottish scribes, was accepted as his by Victorian editors—even, to begin with, by Furnivall and the Chaucer Society.4 One of Chaucer's other voices is to be heard in the ‘Letter of Cupid,’ for here Hoccleve followed his master in adapting the courtly matter of Cupid from the French: the god Cupid writes a letter to his loyal servants offering a defence of women against false lovers and slanderers of the sex (he mentions Ovid and Jean de Meun). It is clear that Hoccleve had Chaucer's Legend of Good Women in mind here, for Cupid refers to ‘our legende of martirs’.5 In later life, Hoccleve was to report that some ladies took offence at the ‘Letter,’ presumably because it quoted the opposition anti-feminist case at too great length; but the poem won a secure place in that select group of courtly pieces, many of them by Chaucer himself (including the Legend), which circulated in fifteenth- and sixteenth-century copies. It appears in three manuscripts of the so-called Oxford group, in one of Shirley's manuscripts, in a Scottish ‘Chaucerian’ collection, in the Findern anthology, and in two major sixteenth-century volumes, the Bannatyne and Devonshire manuscripts.6 The poem was printed by Thynne in his 1532 Chaucer, and it continued to appear in later ‘Chaucers’ up to and including Urry's in 1721.7

If all Hoccleve's poems were like his Marian pieces or the ‘Letter of Cupid,’ he might be remembered only as a technically proficient Chaucer clone; but his actual body of work creates a very different impression. Hoccleve's claim to attention in his own right rests mainly upon The Regement of Princes, the so-called Series, and the ‘Male Regle’; and these works, taken together with some of the epistolary ballades, witness to a mind quite unlike that of his master. The essential, and undoubtedly damaging, difference is that Hoccleve had very little imagination—if by that one understands a capacity and desire to dwell in imaginary worlds, or at least to transgress the limits of one's own immediate experience:

He had as much imagination
          As a pint-pot;—he never could
Fancy another situation
From which to dart his contemplation,
          Than that wherein he stood.(8)

Chaucer is supreme among English poets in his ability to ‘fancy another situation’: even in such a short piece as the Prioress's Tale he manages to conjure up a whole little world of people and places—the school, the street, the Jewish quarter, the boy and his schoolmate, the mother—and also to persuade many readers that it is seen from that other situation which the fancied Prioress occupies. By contrast, Hoccleve's Miracle of the Virgin lacks imaginative body. His story of the miraculous origin of Our Lady's Psalter is competently told; but it leaves (if my own experience is to be trusted) only the faintest imprint of its outlines upon the memory. Hoccleve's best imagined narratives concern encounters between himself and another—the old almsman in the Regement prologue and the friend in the Series. These scenes display the poet's undoubted skill at rendering dialogue in verse; but he can hardly be said here to get outside the ‘situation wherein he stood’, for the energy of the scenes is drawn most from precisely that situation, which is the chief subject of the conversation in both. The friend has opinions but no character; and the almsman is a far fainter presence than Wordsworth's corresponding creation, the old leechgatherer, let alone the old man in the Pardoner's Tale.9 Both the Regement and the Series, it is true, also incorporate a variety of subsidiary narratives set in imagined worlds (fictive or not) quite remote from the real worlds, private and public, of Hoccleve's own experience—the two Gesta Romanorum stories in the Series and the numerous moral exempla in the Regement—but even the best of these ‘goodly tales’, the story of John of Canace (Regement, 4180-354), remains firmly subordinated to its non-imaginary context and occasion.

Yet if Hoccleve cannot hold a candle to his master as a poet of imaginary worlds, he has his own distinctive strength as a poet of the non-imaginary worlds of public and private life. He does best, in fact, what Chaucer hardly does at all. Chaucer rarely addresses himself to the public affairs of the day, either in general or in particular (witness his passing reference to the Peasants' Revolt), and he only once permits more than a glimpse of his private circumstances—and that in a fantastically imaginary context.10 The private and public worlds displayed in the Chaucer Life-Records bear little or no relation to the worlds we inhabit as readers of his poems. By contrast, the ‘Appendix of Hoccleve Documents, copied from the Record Office by Mr R. E. G. Kirk’ in Furnivall's edition of the Minor Poems takes one directly into the world of the poems themselves.11 ‘Thomas Hoccleve, unus clericorum nostrorum de officio privati sigilli nostri’, is recognizably the author of the Series, the ‘Male Regle,’ and the Regement, living in a state of anxious dependency upon the favour of the great and the uncertain grant of his annuity.

The Hoccleve who writes on public themes has attracted rather little attention recently: the righteous indignation of his attack on Lollardy in the ‘Address to Sir John Oldcastle’ has repelled most readers, and Furnivall's 1897 edition of the Regement has yet to be replaced by a critical and annotated edition in modern times.12 Yet the Regement, which survives in no less than forty-three manuscripts, was far and away Hoccleve's most successful poem in its day, and it must presumably again occupy a central place in any future account of his achievement. Recent studies have shown more interest in that other unChaucerian Hoccleve, the poet of the home and the office, the pub and the club. This is the Hoccleve whom Derek Brewer justly characterizes as ‘amusing but undignified’.13 If Chaucer may be considered an example of the ‘negative capability’ of which Keats spoke, this Hoccleve can only represent, by contrast, the egotistical ridiculous. Like Pandarus, Hoccleve ‘japes at himself’, and his japes expose him to ridicule in a way that Chaucer's more guarded self-depreciations rarely if ever do.14 Yet this peculiar mixture of clowning and complaint is neither pointless nor artless: Hoccleve is at once bringing himself to the attention of those upon whom his livelihood depended and at the same time discovering his own distinctive way of writing poems. Both the ‘Male Regle’ and also, in its much more ambitious fashion, the Series represent something new in English poetry—nothing less, in the latter case, than a long poem in which the poet himself plays the leading role.15

Hoccleve and Chaucer hardly resembled each other in temperament, and most of Hoccleve's poems, as I have suggested, are of a kind quite different from his predecessor's. Yet it remains evident that he could not have written them in the way he does—not even the least Chaucerian of them—had Chaucer not lived. The example of Troilus, the Conterbury Tales, and the shorter poems might well have been enough, even if Hoccleve had not been ‘aqueynted with Caucher’; but it is tempting to suppose that the master's ‘consail and reed’ played a significant part in forming the younger poet's awareness of the disciplines of English verse. Lydgate (who does not claim to have known Chaucer) records that Chaucer ‘said alway the best’ when called upon to comment on other people's poems:

My maister Chaucer, þat founde ful many spot,
Hym liste nat pinche nor gruche at every blot,
Nor meve hym silf to parturbe his rest
(I have herde telle) but seide alweie þe best.(16)

This interesting piece of anecdotal evidence confirms the impression given by his poems, that Chaucer was not one to speak of the innermost secrets of his art. Perhaps, like some more recent poets, he preferred to confine discussion to technical matters and so minimize any perturbation of his rest. Yet the poet who in the House of Fame feared for the error of a single syllable in his verses (line 1098) and who in Troilus prayed that they should not be ‘mismetred’ by scribes (v, 1796) was not one to speak lightly about technical matters; and it may be conjectured that his discussions with Hoccleve were quite earnestly concerned with the duty of composing lines and stanzas of verse according to the dictates of the ‘art poetical’.

Hoccleve's sense of responsibility to that art as it was practised by his master finds its clearest expression, characteristically, in an apologetic request for correction:

If þat I in my wrytynge foleye,
As I do ofte, I can it nat withseye,
Meetrynge amis, or speke unfittyngly,
Or nat by iust peys my sentences weye,
And nat to the ordre of endytyng obeye,
And my colours sette ofte sythe awry,
With al myn herte wole I buxumly
It to amende and to correcte him preye;
For undir his correccioun stande y.(17)

Like Chaucer's coinage ‘mysmetre’, Hoccleve's ‘meetrynge amis’ must refer (though not exclusively) to the matter of syllable count. In a recent essay, Judith Jefferson has demonstrated the scrupulosity of Hoccleve's attention to this matter, as displayed in his own autograph copies. These copies show, for instance, that Hoccleve consistently employed variant forms of words in order to ensure that his lines should not ‘fayle in a sillable’. Chaucer would certainly have approved.18 After referring to this matter, in the stanza quoted, Hoccleve goes on to invoke the standard rhetorical doctrines of decorum (‘speke unfittyngly’), dispositio (‘the ordre of endytyng’), and colores (‘my colours’). Like Chaucer's similar apologies, Hoccleve's imply a claim—a claim to be at least aspiring to meet the high standards of premeditated art set by the Latin artes poetriae. The ideal was expressed by Geoffrey of Vinsauf in a passage which both Hoccleve and Chaucer rendered into English. Here is Hoccleve's version:

‘Thow woost wel, who shal an hous edifie
Gooth nat therto withoute avisament
If he be wys, for with his mental ye
First is it seen, pourposid, cast and ment,
How it shal wroght been, elles al is shent.’(19)

But the most interesting of Hoccleve's apologies concerns the possibility that he may on occasion ‘nat by iust peys my sentences weye’. The ideal of artistic premeditation or ‘avisament’ evidently requires that a poet's thoughts or ideas should be weighed out ‘by just measure’.20 I guess that Hoccleve had in mind here, among other things, his experience in writing the kind of stanzaic verse that he learned from Chaucer. In the majority of his works, Hoccleve employs long ballade stanzas, most often rhyme royal but sometimes eight- or nine-line stanzas.21 The composition of these requires that the mind or ‘mental ye’ should see in advance how they are to turn out—the shape of the syntax of cach, and the development of its thought. In particular, the principle of ‘iust peys’ requires that the thought should be weighed out so prudently that the stanza does not, as it were, run out of matter in its closing lines. One of the pleasures of reading Hoccleve is to see how well, on the whole, he succeeded in mastering this art—controlling the syntax and sense of the whole stanza with a firm hand. Here, for instance, is his stanzaic amplification of an ancient commonplace:

‘How fair thyng or how precious it be
Þat in the world is, it is lyk a flour,
To whom nature yeven hath beautee
Of fressh heewe and of ful plesant colour,
With soote smellynge also and odour;
But as soone as it is bicomen drye,
Farwel colour, and the smel gynneth dye.’

(‘Dialogue,’ 267-73)

In this rhyme-royal stanza, the first five lines are devoted to comparing the beauty and value of earthly things to the colour and scent of a flower. The fourth and fifth lines depart from the concise manner of the first three to indulge in what may seem merely slack synonymy: ‘heewe … colour’, ‘smellynge … odour’; but the final couplet, which concerns the dying flower, makes this expansiveness meaningful by setting against it the bald manner, without variation or epithet, in which the last line recapitulates the flower's colour and smell:

But as soone as it is bicomen drye,
Farwel colour, and the smel gynneth dye.

Hoccleve's style of writing is in some ways unlike Chaucer's. Although he is just as careful about the syllable count, his rhythms seem more uncertain; and his English tends more to the plain and to the colloquial than Chaucer's does. There are, as several critics have noticed, far fewer verbal echoes of Chaucer than one would expect to find in the work of an immediate follower.22 Yet Hoccleve's debt to Chaucer, and especially to rhyme-royal Chaucer, was immense. One way of measuring it is to compare his version of the miracle of Our Lady's Psalter with the version in the Auchinleck Manuscript—taking the latter (perhaps a little unfairly) to represent the state of English verse as Chaucer found it. Here are the two opening of the story:

AUCHINLECK:
A riche man was while
Þat loved no gile;
He loved holi chirche.
Bisiden him a mile
An abbay of Seyn Gile
His eldren dede wirche.
HOCCLEVE:
Ther was whilom, as þat seith the scripture,
In France a ryche man and a worthy,
That God and holy chirche to honure
And plese enforced he him bisily;
And unto Crystes modir specially
Þat noble lady, þat blissid virgyne,
For to worsshipe he dide his might and payne.(23)

Hoccleve's stanza of rhyme royal is by no means one of his best; but it does represent, by contrast with his predecessor's tail rhyme, that enhanced awareness of the ample potentialities of English verse which Hoccleve was among the first to learn from Chaucer.

Notes

  1. The Regement of Princes, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s. 72 (1897), 1958-74, 2077-107, 4978-5012. Citations throughout are from the EETS editions of Hoccleve's works, but with some altered punctuation.

  2. Doubts are expressed by Jerome Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve: A Study in Early Fifteenth-Century English Poetic (Urbana, Ill., 1968), 115-18, and in his essay, ‘Hoccleve's Tribute to Chaucer’, in A. Esch (ed.), Chaucer und Seine Zeit: Symposion für Walter F. Schirmer (Tübingen, 1968), 275-83. For arguments to the contrary, see J. A. Burrow, ‘Autobiographical Poetry in the Middle Ages: The Case of Thomas Hoccleve’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 68 (1982), 397-8.

  3. Christ Church, Oxford, MS 152. Like Chaucer, Hoccleve prefaces the miracle narrative with a Marian prologue: items VI and VII in The Minor Poems II, ed. I. Gollancz, EETS, e.s. 73 (1897), reissued with The Minor Poems I, ed. F. J. Furnivall, EETS, e.s. 61 (1892), in one volume revised by J. Mitchell and A. I. Doyle (1970).

  4. Minor Poems I, item x. The two manuscripts are Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B. 24 and National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 18, 2, 8. On the career of this poem as ‘Chaucer's “Mother of God”’ in the nineteenth century, see E. P. Hammond, Chaucer: A Bibliographical Manual (New York, 1908), 438-9, and Minor Poems I, xxxix-xl. It may be noted that both Chaucer and Hoccleve translated Marian poems of Deguileville: Chaucer from Le Pelerinage de la Vie Humaine (‘An ABC’), Hoccleve from Le Pelerinage de l'Ame (Regement, xxxvii-xlv).

  5. Line 316, not in the French of Christine de Pisan. The best discussion of the Letter is by John V. Fleming, ‘Hoccleve's “Letter of Cupid” and the “Quarrel” over the Roman de la Rose’, Medium Aevum, 40 (1971), 21-40. Fleming notes that Hoccleve's later defence of the poem (‘Dialogue,’ 745-84) may be seen as his ‘adaptation of that elegant fiction spun by Chaucer in the “Prologue” to the Legend of Good Women’.

  6. Bodleian MSS Fairfax 16, Tanner 346, and Bodley 638; Trinity College, Cambridge, MS R. 3, 20; Bodleian MS Arch. Selden B, 24; Cambridge University Library MS Ff. 1, 6; National Library of Scotland MS Adv. 1, 1, 6 and British Library MS Add. 17492. The ‘Letter’ is also found with Chaucer's Troilus in Durham University Library MS Cosin V, ii, 13. There are two other MS copies: Huntington Library MS HM. 744 (Hoccleve's holograph) and Bodleian MS Digby 181.

  7. Hammond, Chaucer, pp. 434-6.

  8. Shelley on Wordsworth, Peter Bell the Third, 298-302.

  9. Comparison between the Regement prologue and the Pardoner's Tale is suggested by M. C. Seymour (ed.), Selections from Hoccleve (Oxford, 1981), xxiii.

  10. Nun's Priest's Tale, VII, 3396; House of Fame, 614-60. Even in Melibee Chaucer addresses public affairs obliquely within a fictional context. It is Hoccleve, not Chaucer, who refers to Edward III and John of Gaunt by name (Regement, 2556, 512). Yet Hoccleve defers to Chaucer on a matter of public policy (the holding of council meetings on holy days): Chaucer, he says, makes this kind of point better than I can (Regement, 4978-81). Chaucer's surviving works offer no obvious ‘caas semblable’.

  11. Minor Poems I, li-lxx, with additions on pp. lxxi-lxxii.

  12. A new edition is in preparation by David Greetham and others.

  13. D. S. Brewer (ed.), Chaucer and Chaucerians: Critical Studies in Middle English Literature (London, 1966), 28.

  14. Pandarus ‘gan at hymself to jape faste’ (Troilus, II, 1164). Chaucer's own style of japing is best sampled in the Envoy to Scogan.

  15. J. A. Burrow, ‘Hoccleve's Series: Experience and Books’, in R. F. Yeager (ed.), Fifteenth-Century Studies: Recent Essays (Hamden, Conn., 1984), 259-73.

  16. Lydgate, Troy Book, ed. H. Bergen, EETS, e.s. 97, 103, 106, 126 (1906-20), V, 3521-4.

  17. ‘Balade to my gracious Lord of York’, Minor Poems I, item IX, lines 46-54.

  18. Judith A. Jefferson, ‘The Hoccleve Holographs and Hoccleve's Metrical Practice’, in Derek Pearsall (ed.), Manuscripts and Texts (Cambridge, 1987), 95-109. Jefferson's discussion of final -e in the Hoccleve holographs incidentally throws light on the still sometimes disputed question of final -e in Chaucer, for she shows beyond doubt that -e is syllabic in the disciple. Can it have been otherwise in the master?

  19. ‘Dialogue,’ 638-42. The holograph adds parts of Geoffrey's Latin in the margin: ‘Si quis habet fundare domum, non currit ad actum’ and ‘Impetuosa manus, &c’ (Poetria Nova, 43-4). Compare Troilus, I, 1065-9. J. Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, 119-20, rightly notes that Hoccleve's version is independent of Chaucer's.

  20. ‘Peyse’ (glossed ‘id est pondus’) appears in a similar context in Lydgate's Reson and Sensuallyte, ed. E. Sieper, EETS, e.s. 84 (1901), line 1666.

  21. See the excellent discussion of Hoccleve's relation to Chaucer in M. R. Pryor, ‘Thomas Hoccleve's Series: An Edition of MS Durham Cosin V, iii, 9’ (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of California, Los Angeles, 1968), pp. 52-3. Hoccleve uses the term ‘balade’ for what we would now call a rhyme-royal stanza in ‘Dialogue,’ 551.

  22. Thus Pryor, ‘Thomas Hoccleve's Series’, 38-44, Mitchell, Thomas Hoccleve, 118-22, Seymour, Selections, xxi-xxvii. Echoes do occur, of course. Thus, the Regement occasionally echoes Chaucer's shorter poems: ‘þis olde dotyd Grisel’ (401, cf. Scogan, 35); ‘Pyte, I trowe, is beried’ (882, cf. Pity, 14); ‘it sore me agaste / To bynde me, where I was at my large’ (1454-5, cf. Bukton, 11-12); ‘Suffiseth to your good’ (5375, cf. Truth, 2). See also A. C. Spearing, Medieval to Renaissance in English Poetry (Cambridge, 1985), 114-17.

  23. Auchinleck MS f. 259rb, corresponding to lines 19-24 in the Digby text edited by C. Horstmann, Altenglische Legenden: Neue Folge (Heilbronn, 1881), p. 220; Minor Poems II, item VII, lines 1-7.

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